Layered Approach to Open Source Software Development Success

Open source has emerged as a widely accepted software development phenomenon which has tremendously brought about a significant paradigm shift from traditional software development methodologies such as top down design and stepwise refinement to an unconventional software development approach by means of collaborative software development method among a wide geographically dispersed interested developers and committed project participants while paying less attention to immediate “physical gains”. The open source approach focuses on highly diverse views of developer motivations; ranging from ego gratification, ideological satisfaction and gift culture for individual developers and open source motivations may be viewed from spreading the software development risks and associated maintenance costs at corporate organisational level. In this article, a five layered open onion model of open source was broadly examined. Analysis and evaluation were narrowed down to only the initiation layer of the open onion model. Results show that open source success largely depends on the quality associated with successful initiation of the project. Our findings also reveal that the most popular open source license is GPL and that license type has significant impact on project rank. The domain audience has negative impact on project rank and user interface has significantly negative impact on project’s domain audience. Open source project topics covered have a significant impact on the domain audience and a negative effect on the user interface. This research has also presented a conceptual framework of open source success tree.